Thursday, February 5, 2009

Throughout January 2009, Microsoft added about 100TB worth of imagery to Virtual Earth. Details on which countries were affected are inside.

Microsoft added 48 TB of imagery to Virtual Earth in December 2008, so it was quite a surprise to many when it looked like 2009 would only be starting off with new road data for North America, Europe, and Asia. Well that thought has been crushed with Virtual Earth's latest imagery release being a massive 100TB worth of data this month, according to Chris Pendleton. If memory serves correctly, that beats any month in 2008.The countries that will see updates are as follows. For Obliques (Bird's Eye View), new images were added for France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. High Resolution Orthos images were added for England, Greece, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and the US. Satellite images (the major part of this update), thanks to a deal Microsoft struck with DigitalGlobe in October 2008, were added for Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, India, Lithuania, Moldova, Mexico, Montenegro, Panama, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, and South Africa.

To check out all the changes, head over to maps.live.com, choose 3D, and install the latest Virtual Earth 3D (Beta) software.